If data is the new oil, privacy is climate change

2017 was a really bad year for privacy and trust and brand marketers are asking for ways to combat this. With the increasing amount of consumer data combined with the recent changes by Apple in terms of cookie tracking, our industry is needing to act fast in order to address the issues that seem to be a growing concern every day!

Our SVP Jake Denny, shared his view on what this means for all of us in a recent post on Medium.

Data has led marketers to believe they were controlling business outcomes in the digital world. The rise of metrics like clicks and viewability are an artificial way to justify investments in desktop advertising, they do not help brand marketers sleep better. It does not reflect marketshare, product reorders, margin or category growth. Devices and data don’t buy things, people do.

The ‘clean-up’ of digital media and technology to address fraud, transparency and brand safety is not happening in isolation. The savings in fraud will be welcomed against the changing landscape of retail. When increasingly more retailers are closing, or falling into delinquency on their loans, the companies that depend on that shelf space or location for distribution also take a hit. Digital might have been able to get a click, but that click itself did not directly lead to more soap sales. In a physical world, less bars of soap (stock weight) sitting on a shelf (on shelf availability) will lead to less sales of soap. Retail has the unique advantage of determining which soap you might purchase through the planogram (the layout of products), center of the ‘diamond’ being the primary goal (eye level shelf positioning). While substantially less than shelf, the other two determining factors would be price and brand loyalty. Fighting for brand awareness, recall, favorability and loyalty was the role of brand advertising. It is what David Ogilvy wrote about. It is what Don Draper represented. Make a lasting impact. And keep doing it. But digital has got marketers and their agencies hooked on direct response. Optimize to arbitrary outcomes. Buy cheap inventory so long as you can use data to track events.

“If today is considered a retail apocalypse, then what’s coming next could truly be scary.”

As Amazon continues to disrupt, and new companies enter digital retail, the rules change. Brand loyalty matters, but weighted by a different system. Companies like Dollar Shave Club, StitchFix, Omaze, Blue Apron, Instacart and Rent The Runway have been able to change the relationship by adding a different experience to how you receive the goods. Whether it is curation, convenience, cost, or a combination of all three…